Valve Back in the Game-Making Bizz, Gabe Newell Confirms

10 March 2018

Last year in a Reddit AMA, Newell did confirm that Valve is working on at least one fully single-player games, in addition to confirming three VR games later in the year.

Newell also revealed that Valve has always been jealous of Nintendo, as the Japanese company has always been able to develop software and then hardware that would go well with the games in development.

That's according to a number of sources, including video games personality Geoff Keighley on Twitter (below) and PCGamer, who were at a briefing about upcoming DOTA 2 card game Artifact at Valve's offices in Bellevue, Washington.

The outlets report that chief Gabe Newell said that the aforementioned project was the first of many to come out of the American game maker. Not Half-Life 3 confirmed good, but good all the same.

Going by Newell's statement, it seems that Valve is really focused on bringing something new to PC gaming instead of simply hashing out the same experiences everyone's been having before.

Speaking during an interview yesterday, Valve's CEO talked about how his company's hardware and software research has helped the games industry. So that's sort of good news.

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Note the plural. New gameS. "We aren't going to be talking about it today", Newell said, "but sort of the big thing, the new arrow we have in our quiver, really, is our ability to develop hardware and software simultaneously".

That's games, plural: Artifact isn't the only game Valve is working on.

Newell says that the studio now has three big VR titles, though we don't know anything about them now.

So does that mean we could see hypothetical Half-Life and Portal threequels on the PlayStation 4 at some point? "When Miyamoto is sitting down and thinking about the next version of Zelda or Mario, he's thinking what is the controller going to look like, what sort of graphics and other capabilities. So that is something we've been jealous of, and that's something that you'll see us taking advantage of subsequently". He also spoke of Valve's worry that too many companies were moving PC games towards closed, proprietary ecosystems like the iPhone.